Subscription genealogy site Archives.com has added 17 million new US vital and military records. Vital records come from Texas, Colorado and South Carolina; and the military records provide information about individuals who served in the Air Force, Army, Marine Corps, Navy and National Guard during the Vietnam War and Gulf War eras. Click here to see more details on the Archives.com additions.

And the grand prize winner is … Patricia Skubis! Her long-lost Danish relative Tage will travel to the United States so they can meet in person for the first time. Patricia also will receive a year-long VIP membership to Family Tree Magazine and a three-year Premium-Plus subscription with MyHeritage.com.

Patricia belongs to a Danish family that immigrated to the United States in 1888. Another branch had headed for Australia in 1873. Skubis made contact 27 years ago with Alison Rogers from the Australian branch, but they were unable to find a connection. Here’s Patricia’s account of how it finally happened (look for more details in an upcoming issue of Family Tree Magazine):

In March of 2011, a family in Denmark researching the Thygesen name posted information on MyHeritage and I received a Smart Match notice. I wasn’t sure we had a match. The parents’ names were the same but the children did not match. So I asked the submitter for more information. With the additional information I thought we did indeed have a match.

I went online to the Danish Church Records [on the Danish archives’ website] and found Tyge Jørgensen’s children between Neils Madsen Thygesen, born in 1794, and my great-great-grandfather Martin, born in 1805. What a great surprise I received when I found that the next son after Neils was Peder Andersen Thygesen, the great-great-grandfather of Alison Rogers.

Tage and I are fourth cousins once removed. Our great-great-grandfathers, along with Alison’s, were brothers.

Linda Mehlinger, whose mystery started with her Louisiana-born great-grandmother’s photo of a lady and five schoolgirls in a rickshaw being pulled by a Zulu warrior. Through research including searching the 1910 census on Ancestry.com and contacting other genealogists via a mailing list, she discovered a cousin in South Africa who had pictures of the same people.

Pam Ingermanson, whose Norwegian ancestors settled in Idaho. After hours upon hours of research, she connected with a cousin who descended from a brother who ended up in Ohio. The branches of the family had lost touch over the years.

You can read the winners’ full stories, as well as those of other entrants, in their comments on the MyHeritage.com Blog.

Thank you to everyone who entered this contest. Both our team at Family Tree Magazine and our contest partners MyHeritage.com were touched by your stories of reconnecting with family, and we're impressed by your diligent research. You’re truly an inspiration to your fellow family historians!

Mocavo.com has announced it’ll give away an iPad 2 on July 15 to someone who’s uploaded a tree. In response to a comment on the Mocavo.com Facebook page, webmasters also said they’re working on a non-Facebook upload method, and hope to have it in place before the end of the entry period.

If you have an iPad or iPhone, here’s a more educational way than Angry Birds to pass the time, especially on the Fourth of July: MultiEducator’s History on the Go apps use images, contemporary accounts, multimedia presentations and documents to help you learn about the American Revolution, Civil War, Constitution and Federalist Papers, and more. They’re available for about $5 through the Apple iTunes store (the Constitution app is free).

You also can opt to have your tree included in the Mocavo.com search engine. (The site will automatically exclude living people.)

The Civil War Trust, a battlefield preservation organization, has announced Campaign 150: Our Time, Our Legacy, a campaign to raise $40 million for the permanent protection of 20,000 acres of battlefield land over the next five years. An average of 30 acres of battlefield land are lost each day, according to Battle Cry of Freedom author James McPherson.

If you have a Revolutionary War-era Patriot ancestor, applications for the Sons of the American Revolution (SAR) lineage society are a great research resource.

These applications are worth a search even if you don't know of a Patriot in your family tree, because they name other ancestors who link SAR applicants to Patriots. You may find an ancestor or collateral relative among one of those names.

Through July 4, you can search SAR applications dating from 1889 to 1970 free on Ancestry.com. (After you hit Search, you’ll be prompted to set up a free account to view your results.) The collection includes 145,000 applications.

courthouses (and their records) destroyed during the Civil War and in fires and floods at other times

hard-to-research Colonial-era immigrants

potentially confusing land records due to the carving up of Virginia’s enormous original territory into other states, a maze of courts, and many cities that are independent of their surrounding counties

You’ll also learn about Virginia records including headrights and vital records, and the best websites for Virginia research (including the Library of Virginia, whose Virginia Memory site has digitized newspapers, military records and other genealogical resources).

The quiz, by One-Step Tools webmaster Steve Morse and friends, is designed to guide you through the site’s tools that help you determine your ancestor’s 1940 census enumeration district (ED). This is important because, when the 1940 census comes out April 2, 2012, you won’t be able to search by name. Instead, you’ll need to find the records for the ED where your ancestor lived and view pages until you find him or her.

(If you don’t mind waiting an as-yet-unknown length of time for a searchable name index to be created, probably by FamilySearch and/or a commercial entity such as Ancestry.com, you may not need to worry about the ED. I say “may not” because if your ancestor gets mis-indexed or the census-taker recorded his name in an unexpected way, you still might need to browse the records.)

Anyway, I tried the quiz for a spin and did indeed find the 1940 ED I needed. Here’s how it worked for me:

Question: Do you know where your family lived on April 1, 1940, the official 1940 census day?

Answer: I chose yes. This was my hint to check the address in my ancestor’s 1942 declaration of intention to naturalize:

Question: Did the family move between 1930 and 1940?

Answer: Yes.

Question: You know where your family was in 1940. Were they:

in a rural area or a small urban community (under about 5,000)?

in an urban area of 5,000 or more?

in an institution (hospital, jail, orphanage, etc)?

outside the US proper but under US jurisdiction?

Answer: They lived in Cleveland, Ohio, an urban area of 5,000 or more.

Question: Check to see if the city is on the One Step 1940 Large City ED Finder Tool. Go to this tool, choose the state or possession, and look in the city dropdown box. Do you see your city listed there?

Answer: I clicked the link to the 1040 ED Finder, chose Ohio from the state dropdown menu, and yes, Cleveland was in the city menu.

Question: OK, now to use the above One Step tool, choose the state and city and then enter the street and cross streets for the house at which your family lived.

Answer: I went back to the 1940 ED Finder, which looked like this:

I chose my ancestors’ street, Franklin Blvd, and was directed to choose a cross street.

Um, cross street? Luckily, at the bottom of the page you can enter a house number and generate a Google, Yahoo! or MapQuest map of the location, like this one:

I chose 47th W. as the cross street and was rewarded with:

The "View microfilm " link gives you a message that the 1940 census images are not available. Looks like Morse is planning to link the ED numbers to the record images when they're released on NARA's website ext year.

I tried other quiz answers, too:

Basically, if you don’t know where your ancestors lived in 1940, you’ll get suggestions for records to check.

If you know where they lived in 1940 and they hadn't moved since 1930, you’ll be directed to the site’s 1930-to-1940 ED Conversion tool (EDs changed from census to census).

If your ancestors lived in a small-ish town or rural area, the area may not yet be covered in the One Step 1940 ED Finder, in which case you’re directed to National Archives’ ED maps (not yet online). Those will be easier to use if you know the street address.

If you don't know the address in the small-ish town or rural area, you can use the One Step ED Definition Tool to choose a state and county, then search on a community name. If the name is in the definitions, you’ll get back a list of possible EDs where you can start your census search.

June 28, 1861, the Pawnee arrived at the Washington, DC, Navy Yard carrying the body of Capt. James H. Ward, the first US Naval officer killed during the American Civil War

The previous day, Ward, who was in command of a flotilla in the Chesapeake Bay, send a landing party to meet Southern forces at Mathias Point in King George County, Va. They met resistance, and Ward was shot after he moved the ships in to cover for the landing party as it retreated.

At the beginning of the war, the US Navy had just 90 ships; it grew to 670 ships and 50,000 sailors by mid-1964. The Confederate Navy had 130 warships and 4,000 men at its largest.

Dramatic events such as battles and shore bombardments were the exception to the rule for sailors, according to the book Life in Civil War America:

“Sailors spent the majority of their time performing routine duties or combating the effects of tedium. Running a ship required constant if monotonous activity; unlike soldiers, seamen tended not to have much idle time on their hands. An exception to this was, of course, Union soldiers on board blockading ships, who often complained of boredom in journals and letters.”